'The Dilemma of Desire': Film Review | SXSW 2020

Proximitywears its old-school sci-fi heart on its sleeve, beginning with the Close Encounters-quoting pow of an opening and flipping through a catalog of movie references. The homage, however endearing, proves limiting too for this tale of alien abduction, wide-eyed innocents and covert government baddies.

Just over 50 years after their debut on Saturday morning TV in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, the four teen sleuths of Mystery Inc. and their talking Great Dane sidekick return for another action-packed crime-busting mission.

A naive housewife takes surprising steps to reclaim her independence after discovering that her husband blew their savings on escorts in this well-acted French-language drama.

Debuting on demand, rather than in theaters, this attractive but calculated attempt to connect 'Scooby-Doo' to other Hanna-Barbera characters abandons the show's fun teen-detective format.

An inventive parable, Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña's breathtaking animation continuously redefines reality in startlingly timely ways.

A snowbound bag-of-cash thriller set in the vast North Maine Woods, John Barr's Blood and Money casts Tom Berenger as an ailing hunter trying to escape from bank robbers who want their money back. A solid B movie whose pleasures aren't diminished much by the screenplay's dicey dialogue — plenty of the film has no dialogue at all — it's a welcome vehicle for its star, who has been underused by filmmakers for decades.

A shaky narrative is given ballast by two vivid and well-matched leads in Sabrina Doyle’s exasperating, sporadically touching feature debut, the blue-collar melodrama Lorelei. As former high school sweethearts reconnecting amid dire socioeconomic circumstances, Pablo Schreiber and Jena Malone hustle to overcome movie-ish dialogue and clichéd story dynamics, investing their life-bruised characters with authentic feeling.

Clementine

Befitting a documentary executive produced by Errol Morris, Enemies of the State is polished, assured and chilling. But as director Sonia Kennebeck traces a tale of hacker culture, government surveillance and extreme family loyalty, the smooth surface buckles.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] In the hard-hitting and heartbreaking documentary Jacinta, a young mother suffers the effects of heroin addiction that plagued her own mother as well, prolonging a cycle of abuse and incarceration that repeats itself across a generation. Stories of drugs, jail and recidivism are, alas, nothing new in America.

[In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] There's plenty of wild and intimate beauty and not a little blood in Kokoloko, the first feature from Gerardo Naranjo since his 2011 international breakout, Miss Bala.

[In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] If nothing else (and there is plenty else) Bo McGuire strikes a campily confident pose. Hirsute of face and loud of shirts, a Virginia Slim always dangling from his lips or fingers, this Alabama-born artist swans his way through his feature debut, Socks on Fire.

For his lucid and perceptive look at Stanley Kubrick's unparalleled body of work, Gregory Monro excerpts a number of archival clips. It's not the filmmaker who's at the center of most of them but his collaborators, testifying to his exacting methods.

[In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] What a pleasure to see the underrated Steve Zahn in a leading role that fully capitalizes on the contradictory currents coursing through his screen persona — of mellowness and wired energy, grounded warmth and off-kilter unpredictability.

[In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] For those of us whose memory of Hurricane Maria boils down to footage of President Donald Trump scornfully tossing out paper towels to a crowd at a disaster relief center, Cecilia Aldarondo’s documentary Landfall offers up a welcome flipside: images of Puerto Ricans proudly and painfully trying to rebuild their island amid a

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] The Brazilian government's efforts in the run-up to the 2016 Summer Olympics to clean up crime in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, a program dubbed "pacification," were part of a widely reported broader sweep to hide the city's poor from international visitors.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] Whether the Storage Wars crew would have recognized the value of a box of letters discovered in a Los Angeles storage unit in 2014 is open to debate. But it's a good thing that directors Michael Seligman and Jennifer Tiexiera did.

[Note: In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to screen digitally for critics.] An uncompelling spinoff of the director's 2017 film about women sentenced to death row, Sabrina Van Tassel's The State of Texas vs. Melissa interviews the family and supporters of Melissa Lucio, a woman convicted of killing her 2-year-old daughter in 2007.

[Note: In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to screen digitally for critics.] Joshua Leonard's 2011 feature debut, The Lie, explored a sort of identity crisis that resulted when a new parent (Leonard) used his baby as an excuse to ditch work. The crisis starts earlier in Fully Realized Humans, which again sees Leonard and Jess Weixler playing a couple who perhaps shouldn't be trusted with a baby.

A native of the place strangers call Easter Island amplifies a call for self-rescue in Eating Up Easter, Sergio M. Rapu's eco-themed documentary.